cluberti

I try not to play in the grey area on things like this - it's not illegal everywhere, and it doesn't allow you to illegaly use XP itself (like circumventing WGA or activation), so it doesn't technically violate rule #1 in my book. It's such a broad area, and since we're a global site on the 'net, I can't assume that it's illegal for everyone just because it's a violation of the EULA in, say, the US.

OK, so user-mode is hung. You will need to try making a remote connection to a share on the box (like \\server\c$), or connecting to it remotely using the computer management console on another box - and of course, try to ping it. If you can't even ping it or make a remote RPC connection, the kernel itself may be hung at which point I will strongly suggest that you follow the "Memory dump of the entire system" section of this post, and the next time the box hangs try getting it to bugcheck via holding down the right CTRL key and pressing the Scroll Lock key twice. In almost all scenarios, if you can't ping it and the keyboard dump doesn't work with an attached PS/2 keyboard, you have a hardware problem.

In countries where the EULA is considered binding, this is technically a violation of the EULA as it modifies the product (XP) to work other than designed.

By freeze, what do you mean? Can you move the mouse, can you ping the machine from another, etc? Basically, how "frozen" is it?

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downlo...0Audio%20Codecs

I believe that in the RDP 6.1 client, they are changing this behavior to the "old style" password prompt behavior if connecting to a non-Vista or Server 2008 machine.

If the key is from a Dell OEM CD, and you're using a non-Dell OEM CD, then it's very, very likely the key will not work. I think there are ways around this and I'm sure it's been discussed on how to get OEMBIOS files onto a CD, but by default royalty OEM keys and discs are not the same as "retail" or non-royalty OEM discs.

No, localization DOES matter. US keys will not work on localized versions of XP (like German), and the converse of that is also true.

In general, it isn't possible to give Power Users the ability to install generic device drivers. The problem is that when you install any device that can make persistent changes to the system (i.e. a device driver other than a removable disk device or a printer), your account's ACL is checked to see if it's an administrative user - if not, the device installation will fail. This is, unfortunately, expected behavior: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326473

Without damaging the system partition, no. There are 3rd party applications that can do this, but your best bet would be to image the server as a backup, delete and recreate the RAID with the new drives (assuming it's the same controller, drivers won't be an issue) and restore the image on the new array. And I have to agree with the previous poster, any boot volume larger than 40GB or so is a recipe for disaster long-term. With 6 74GB drives, I would say that a boot volume of 40 or so GB and partitioning the rest to hold things like applications, profiles, and other data storage is a much better idea.

Hmm - that's not the default Windows browse window function, so perhaps something else is not installed correctly? Have you tried a reinstall of Firefox (that looks like a firefox window)?

I doubt you'll see any major feature upgrades in XP service pack 3, including IE8. Supposedly it will run on XP SP3, but only if IE8 releases before July 2009 (when XP goes into extended support), would be my guess.

What type of hardware do you want the user to be able to install? Generally, the answer is no, however.

http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/2867...-0-225-121.html

Very good question - do updates fail if you download/install them manually, or just Windows Update?

If things are that slow (and that is pretty slow), consider winlogon and userenv logging - it timestamps things, so you can see where there are delays. If that doesn't help, obviously removing the Citrix, McAfee, Checkpoint, and ZoneLabs software will _definitely_ speed up your boot times.

If it only happens when the spooler is running, then it's DEFINITELY something with a print driver. You have two options: 1) Remove the print queues and uninstall the drivers from the machine (once the queues are removed, open File > Server Properties > Drivers and select any drivers listed here and click "Remove"), and reboot - see if the CPU goes back to normal after a reboot with all services running as normal 2) If you can, gather an adplus "hang" dump of the spooler by doing the following (this is documented here, for reference): 1. Download and install the "Debugging Tools for Windows" 2. Create a directory called c:\websymbols 3. Create a SYSTEM environment variable as follows - you can do this from Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > Environment Variables button > System variables > New... button: Variable Name: _NT_SYMBOL_PATH Variable Value: SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols;c:\websymbols Once you've done the above, here are instructions on how to create the dump: 1. Create a directory called c:\adplus 2. Open a command prompt and change to the directory where you installed the debugging tools. By default, this is "C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows" 3. Type the following commands in the command prompt, each followed by pressing the ENTER key: cscript adplus.vbs -hang -pn wmiprvse.exe -o c:\adplus cscript adplus.vbs -hang -pn spoolsv.exe -o c:\adplus 4. Once the debugger finishes (this can take some time), the command prompt window(s) will close, and you will have data in your C:\adplus folder that can be analyzed. Compress and upload here, or place it somewhere it can be downloaded by us - we can probably tell you for sure which, if you want to go that route.

The error means: E_PROP_ID_UNSUPPORTED The specified property ID is not supported for the specified property set I'm not sure how that relates to you being unable to use Windows Update, but that's what the error means. Perhaps you could take a quick look at the following KB and see if it leads you anywhere? http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;EN-US;910341

If it happens in regular boot but not in safe mode, then it's either an explorer.exe shell extension, a startup item, or a driver causing this issue (none of those things load in safe mode). You can disable all non-Microsoft shell extensions with ShellExView, disable all non-Microsoft startup items with Autoruns, but as for drivers, you have to determine which applications that have drivers you want to uninstall (antivirus, antispyware, backup, firewall, and most security packages all load kernel-mode filter drivers). Note that disabling these applications doesn't remove their kernel-mode filter driver, only uninstallation. If it works in safe mode as expected, one of those three things are the culprit (or perhaps a combination).

As silly as it sounds, can you reproduce this issue in safe mode w/ networking?

Here's your tinfoil hat. ^

Do you remember approximately when this happened? If so, you may be able to do a system restore to a point where it worked. I've seen this with codecs being installed that can mess with media center.

If you've still got your Windows installation CD, you should be able to find any driver.cab files on disk and replace them with the one from the CD. If it's complaining about the file from the installation media, however, you'll likely have to "borrow" identical media from a colleague to replace your damaged media.

Right - javaSCRIPT was. Installing the Windows Script Host update would have replaced all scripting .dlls on the box with the 5.6 versions, which likely fixed the issue of a broken or mismatched .dll issue.

The likelihood that a Windows Update was able to delete something in AD is pretty much nil, but the other part of your statement is where I would start poking around at - the reboot. It's much more likely that something else was done while the box was up that required a reboot (malicious or otherwise), and the reboot after the Windows Updates caused the problem. As to the problem, I do remember having to do this once, and I remember it working on a 2003 RTM machine (it wasn't SBS, however, so I can't speak to that). The AT trick didn't work, but setting the default screensaver in the registry to cmd.exe instead of logon.scr seems to sound very familiar.